The next tier of instance nerf has arrived!

It was announced Monday that the 15% buff has been activated. While I am sure that most people will be talking at length about this, and what it means to them, I wanted to touch briefly on our gearing strategies as a result of this development. What this means to us, primarily, is that we have gained 5% more health. To some this means that they can finally push over the effective health minimums for some bosses. For other, myself included, this means that we can shed some effective health gear for more threat, or mitigation, or even avoidance. While most people will lean towards the first option, that is not to say that there are instances where more mitigation will benefit a tank. Avoidance has pretty much gone to the graveyard from a gearing perspective.

My personal preference, as some of you have read in the past few blogs, is to lean towards more threat. I was having threat issues as it was because some of our dps are very geared, however with 5% more dps out put, they will be even closer to my threat ceiling. This means that we can take a look at what gear we wear for hard modes and how we can tweak it to help with threat issues. Each tanks situation is different, as you will be at different points on the progression curve. A tank who is pushing Lich King Hard mode will welcome the extra health and keep on going with his effective health gearing. This will help paladins get closer and closer to 70k buffed hp. A tank who is working on hard modes with in ICC 25, will want to gear for what they have issues with. And finally, a tank who is looking to get those normal mode kills will have yet another perspective on the necessary gearing philosophy to attain their goals.

When Survival Doesn’t Matter

I have observed over the past few weeks that my survival is no longer an issue with in 11 of the 12 ICC hard modes. Because of this, and the fact that I have been given 5% more health, I can work on dropping some more stamina for threat. There are many ways we can achieve this, however we have to be mindful of a few things. Your healers have been used to the way you take hits over the past month, and as such you do not want to drastically alter your gear set for maximum threat and then try to tank Festergut at three inhales. What you can do is alter your gear set slightly to ensure that you are not losing any of your health based off of the 10% buff while bolstering your stats at the same time.

My EH gear health pool fully raid buffed was around 62k. This means that with another 5% increase in my health, I can confidently shed a little over 3k hp for threat stats, and maintain the same level of relative health. In order for me to effectively increase my threat, I need to drop some stamina for hit and expertise so that I can do more damage, all while swapping out my weapon for a slow threat weapon. In the end, I swapped a few pieces of gear and bumped up to 240 hit and 32 expertise, while buffing my strength marginally. It made a significant difference in my threat out put and my ability to continue to be well ahead of my dps on threat.

While everyone’s situation is a little bit different, based off of the available gear that you have in your bags, the theory on what you want to do is the same. You want to trade off some effective health for threat stats. The major thing that you want to consider is that you need to be aware of the pieces you are replacing so that you can see if you have dropped both armor and stamina, or if you are using pure dps gear, if you have lost too much defense. In the end, with 15% increase in your health, you can tank most things in the game right now with out effective health gear.